After Graham Hill made a whole lot of money selling his internet business, he bought a huge house, a 5-disc CD changer, and more. In fact, his house was so big, Graham had to hire someone to go pick out things he could buy to fill the house:

My house and my things were my new employers for a job I had never applied for.

Now Graham lives in a 420-square-foot apartment in SoHo.

It seems to me that our tendency is to accumulate and hold on to stuff. We swell to our surroundings, sometimes at the peril of our own health, finances, and/or relationships. It takes intentionality to do the opposite.

Seth Godin on honesty in your creative work:

Right now, you can choose to do what’s in your heart, you can bring your real work to the world, instead of a lesser version, a version you think the market wants.

A new Tumblr site by the National Geographic showcasing rare photos, most of which have never been published. Check out the About page, where you can see William Bonner, Guardian of the Collection and Curator of the Photography Archive, in action — no doubt picking out a rare image to be posted.

And the captions are just as great as the captures. Like this one: “A cowgirl puts a nickel in an El Paso parking meter to hitch her pony, October 1939.”

(Via Kottke.)

Hint: It wasn’t with OS X. Stephen Hackett:

Think back to the summer of 1999. People were canning fruits and vegetables in preparation of Y2K, Cher was on the radio everywhere, and people could walk around in denim vests without living in fear of being punched in the face.

The new version of Launch Center Pro brings some serious muscle. If you’re like me and are still wrapping your mind around all the things this app can do, check out Viticci’s review.

Speaking of what makes a great app, David Smith shares some of the guidelines he applies to his work as an independent software developer:

I’m sure some would say that my approach is too heavy-handed and stifles innovation in my apps. I have found the opposite to be true. By constraining the ways I can implement something away from simply duplicating the work of others I force myself to get creative and the result is almost always better.

That’s a truth which applies to a lot of the creative arts — working within constraints often leads to innovation and breakthrough.

Patrick Rhone on what makes a great app. I agree one-hundred-percent.

And what’s interesting is that if you take out any one of those three elements, you can lose the whole thing. Photoshop is a great example of an app which is very ingenious and took a lot of gumption, but it is far from simple. And for a lot of us, it’s one of those apps we use because we have to. Two out of three doesn’t cut it.

Clever, albeit tricky, tip for cleaning up and compressing your OmniFocus sync database in order to speed up syncing to iPhone and iPad. I already have a monthly recurring reminder for archiving my old data, but compressing the database and pushing that to my iDevices is a new trick. And it worked like a charm. My iPhone’s and iPad’s are much smaller and sync is noticeably quicker. I’ll now be doing this twice a year. (Via Federico Viticci.)

Waste Creative made an HTML5 version of their game, Waste Invaders, along with a wild website which compares the pros and cons of building Waste Invaders on Flash Player 11 last summer and HTML5 now. (Via Dan Mall.)

This new feature to Pinboard is one that I’m particularly happy about:

Privacy Lock will make it impossible to add public bookmarks to your account in any form while the setting is turned on. It will also make private bookmarks appear without a dark background, so the site is easier on the eyes.

I’m one of the 12,000 active Pinboard users who has the “add everything as private” setting enabled on my account. And so far, it looks like 292 (now 293) have enabled it. Is it silly to admit I’m mostly happy about this because it improves the design?

A few weeks ago, the Planet Money podcast took a look the idea of individual writers and bloggers who are trying an alternative business model: being directly supported by their readership. Specifically, Robert Smith and Zoe Chase talked to Andrew Sullivan about his taking The Dish independent, as well as to Maura Johnston about her own iOS Newsstand app, Maura Magazine.

At Igloo, we believe that working with other people doesn’t have to be complicated — it’s about three things: content, communication and collaboration. It’s why we integrate our core suite of apps around social tools to create an intranet you’ll actually like.

Your Igloo’s core apps include:

• Blogs to share news and progress updates
• Calendars that sync with your favorite software
• Document storage, securely available anywhere
• Forums to keep your discussions and ideas together
• Microblogs, a private Twitter-like stream for your team
• Wikis for living, collaborative documentation

Everything inside your Igloo is customizable. With multiple channels in each app, it’s easy to show different content to different teams, groups or projects. Plus, we’re securely hosted on the moon in the cloud.

Get started with Igloo today. And if your boss needs some convincing, we’ve got some white papers for her.

* * *

A huge thanks to Igloo Software for once again sponsoring the RSS feed. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

This behind-the-scenes video of David A. Smith’s design project for John Mayer’s Born & Raised album artwork is just fantastic.

Smith is a traditional ornamental glass artist, and so, not only did he design the cover artwork for Born & Raised, but in the process he also created a custom John Mayer font, and made a couple of custom glass signs for John Mayer to have.

The level of detail involved — from pencil sketching the initial artwork, to vectorizing it, to making the glass signs — is just incredible to watch. Very cool.

(Via Sean McCabe.)